Monday, January 14, 2013

The Queen's Tiara

Gustav III Opera House, Stockholm, ~1880 (Source: Svensk Arkitektur)

Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s 1834 work The Queen’s Tiara
(Drottningens Juvelsmycke) - “The
Great Swedish Classic” according to the cover of my Arcadia Press edition - ranked
easily among the most fascinating books I read in 2012 and among the oddest books
I’ve read in any year. Its oddity derives from multiple sources, not least of
which is the book’s incorporation of varieties of form. Almqvist called the
work a “fugue” – and while calling it a novel seems wholly inadequate, I’ll use
the term here for convenience and for my being unable to think of another form capable
of containing The Queen’s Tiara’s grab bag of first and third person
narration, dramatic dialogue, exchanges of letters, short theatrical vignettes,
packages of documents, legal testimonials, songs and narrator’s footnotes that
play along the edges where reality meets fiction.

A sort of realist fairy tale arranged in 12 “books,” The
Queen’s Tiara is framed by a prologue presenting this compendium of texts as
evidence compiled to tell of events surrounding the assassination in 1792 of
Sweden’s King Gustav III at a masked ball in the Stockholm opera house. An enigmatic
narrator, Richard Furamo, nostalgically recounts his tale to a companion, Herr
Hugo, during a discussion of theater at a family dinner decades after the
tumultuous period of “duels and double jealousies…of tempests over locks of
hair and fires in the heart” in which his story is set. Furamo focuses not so
much on the assassination itself – though that scene is vividly related – but
on tangential incidents reconstructed following a chance encounter with two
mad, bitter sisters confined to a castle where Furamo had lodged one night while
traveling. Supplementing his own narrative skills with the documents he has
obtained to piece together the sisters’ history, he weaves an extraordinary
story.

A summary of the story’s convoluted plot would tax my
ability to condense it as well as any reader’s patience with the attempt, but cataloging
some of its chief elements may offer a flavor of what’s involved: a conspiracy to
assassinate the King; two young sisters, Amanda and Adolphine, and their
soldier paramours, Ferdinand and Clas Henrik, both linked to the conspiracy; a
case of mistaken identity that shatters the stability of this romantic quadrangle;
the masquerade ball attended by all during which the King is mortally wounded; the
flight of the conspirators and arrest of the assassin; the theft of a precious,
bejeweled royal diadem (the Queen’s tiara of the title); and finally, fully occupying
the second half of the book and obliging the sisters to “step aside and become
mere walking on parts” in this drama,
the emergence of the mysterious young lead character whose improbable name gives
The Queen’s Tiara its secondary title: “Azouras Lazuli Tintomara.”

This androgynous, enchanting 17-year-old actor/actress,
pursued by all and incapable of loving any, and whose captivating beauty has
already fueled speculation about the cause of several impassioned suicides,
occupies the innocent heart of The Queen’s Tiara. A creature apart,
Tintomara nonetheless appears invariably proximate to the story’s central
events: implicated by reckless gossip in the assassination conspiracy; inadvertently
responsible for the diadem’s theft; connected intimately to the late King
through a complexity of liaisons
dangereuses of sex and blood (involving Tintomara’s mother, the King’s
homosexuality, and the likelihood that Tintomara is the sibling of the King’s
successor, his now thirteen year old son Gustav IV); drawn to the center of a
quincunx formed with the sisters and soldiers we’ve met earlier (in one scene
actually situated geometrically at the intersection of converging paths on
which each of the other four persons approaches Tintomara at the same time,
resulting in an explosive dispersal of all); and finally, squeezed by the exigencies
of politics between her devotion to the new young king and the nefarious
ambitions of the state’s cruel regent.

If all of this sounds absurdly complicated, it is. It is
also wondrously imaginative and clever, whipping sexual psychology and
political theater into a vortex in which the disruptions generated by the decapitation
of state produce an echo - or perhaps a resounding overtone (The Queen’s
Tiara is replete with references to music) - in those caused by Tintomara’s
ambiguous gender and beguiling beauty. Though The Queen’s Tiara coalesces
loosely around historical facts, it wanders far into fanciful realms, in
particular by taking Gustav III’s well-known obsession with the stage and the
operatic quality of his being assassinated during a masquerade ball and
inflating these elements into a riotously theatrical tale with a porous fourth
wall. In one of the book’s more memorable scenes, Adolphine, seeking to escape
the opera house unnoticed on the night of the assassination attempt, climbs
perilously up over the opera set, clinging to its faux treetops and clouds, dislodging
a prop lightening bolt that crashes “into the operatic abyss,” and eventually
making her way through backrooms and corridors as fantastically labyrinthine as
a Piranesi drawing (both interior and exterior architectural descriptions
throughout the work possess an exaggerated, chimerical quality). The narrator
also occasionally pops in to remind readers that the story is partly his own
invention, for example by acknowledging in a footnote the implausibility of
this scene with the opera set and urging Herr Hugo, should he ever make the
tale public, to enhance its believability by inserting a dangling rope to
facilitate Adolphine’s ascent or perhaps a reference to her having taken
gymnastics lessons.

I know of nothing quite like this strange, imaginative book,
with its melding of historical fact and dramatic fiction, romantic fantasy and
hard-edged reality, thriller-like political intrigue and aerial amatory
caprices. Its gender-bending main character and the attendant inability of
those around her/him to accommodate the mere notion of his/her existence are as
canny and original as the tapestry of inventive, nearly baroque conceits
Almqvist constantly unfurls, from copper plates depicting inquisitional
tortures (used to frighten the imprisoned Tintomara) to an elaborate subterfuge
involving a robotic mannequin. Yet far from seeming cultish or marginal in its
fantasy elements, The Queen’s Tiara comes across as a classic indeed: a
compelling historical novel that pre-figures Freudian psychology and blends
Sadean cruelties with the most ethereal romanticism, an oddly moving invocation
of the mysteries of human psychological and political processes, and a daringly
imaginative caracole around the incestuous intertwining of reality and fiction.
It’s also, on top of all that, an enormously entertaining story.

Brian - I surprise myself sometimes with some of these works I'd never heard of. This one was a gem. Though it's been a couple months since I've read it, it seems to have settled into some niche in my head where I won't be able to get it out.

I've read another of his novels, a short book called "The Week with Sara" - in German Die Woche mit Sara. It was also strange and original, a bit more conventional than this but it made me think I would like to read more of him. I remember that he had very modern views on relationships.

What is this crazy thing? You give me some hints - Almqvist has likely been reading E.T.A. Hoffmann and other German Romantics, and probably Sterne, although the Germans had all absorbed Sterne. The book maybe also has something in common with the incident-packed pre-novel novels we now for some reason call "romances."

Wait, a robotic mannequin? All right, that is actually stolen from Hoffmann.

I haven't read Hoffmann but will try to rectify that soon - do you know in which tale I can find the robotic mannequin? I'm sure you're right about the German Romantic influence. One peril of reading works in translation from literatures one knows nothing about is stumbling on something like this that seems like nothing else on earth - until its influences become revealed. Still, that it seemed to me like nothing else on earth made it a surprising, even thrilling thing to read. Now that I've read my castle in the air, I guess I'll have to put a foundation under it and hope that it will still seem as special.

Curiously the other half of Tomcat Murr, the half that is not the autobiography of a cat - it is an odd book - is closer to The Queen's Tiara. Hoffmann specialized in crazy party scenes where people change identities and nothing is what it seems and on like that.